Canonical has unveiled a complete branding overhaul, redesigning everything from the Ubuntu website to its logos and marketing material. However, what interests me more are the new Gtk+ themes, and even then, I'm not interested in the colour choices and the like. No - what stood out to me right away was not the theme itself - but the placement of the titlebar widgets.

The menu is not themed by metacity, but GTK, so, yes, it will look strange for non gnome apps

Actually DataPath is correct. The WM draws the titlebar so any app (GTK, QT3 or 4, or even WINE...) built for any DM (GNOME, KDE3 or 4, etc) will have the same title bar.

You can change the WM in with fusion-icon if you don't like the titlebar - though obviously the easier way is to keep Metacity and change the titlebar in whatever settings app GNOME has for changing themes.

It's bad UI design if the location of important items moves too much. The window close and minimize buttons would always be in a different position, depending on the window size.
Placing buttons in the corner makes them easy to find.

I am not talking about the button placement, but the title placement. For example in the first screenshot that would be 'ubuntu - File Browser'. I think it's better centered both usability-wise and because it look's better (mainly because there's a lot of clutter in the left side).

But what interests me is that previous versions had the title centered, so these guys made a conscious decision to move the title.

They show some design for Xubuntu and Ubuntu, but Kubuntu look like that have been left being again...

Otherwise, it look good. I think it will make a smooth transition between Gnome 2 and 3, as this use color closer to Gnome 3 default theme. So, they may drop custom skin to use the new default, after all.

One of the screenshot also show global menubar on an Asus computer. Strange, Asus said they were dropping Linux, so it is strange that Ubuntu website show a big Asus logo with what seem to be a custom Ubuntu build.

KDE has this initiative to share a common KDE identity among various distros and many distributors followed it by at most tweaking KDE's Oxygen/Air themes (openSUSE has a green Air wallpaper as opposed to blue, for example).

Yeah, Kubuntu doesn't even tweak themes, but in this case Canonical's laziness may even work to KDE's advantage. ;-)

Too bad that Canonical currently doesn't really "get it" (even though -- in all fairness -- Kubuntu 10.04 seems to be a massive improvement over previous releases). I mailed with Aurlien who works for Canonical on KDE software and his job there is to take ideas from the Desktop Experience team and implement them in KDE SC. So far those ideas only cover aspects that are foremost developed for GNOME. In advantage of KDE, Canonical's idea to overhaul GNOME's systray makes use of KDE's protocol that is implemented there since SC 4.3 and Aurlien's work is to port further KDE apps to it.
Sadly, at least for now Canonical seems to have no intentions to do KDE-specific usability work as they do for GNOME.

Maybe Canonical will strengthen the KDE/Qt side of things once MeeGo (Qt-based successor to Moblin) is released. As with Ubuntu's current "Moblin Edition" there surely will be a "MeeGo Edition" and naturally KDE apps will fit in there better than GTK apps.

This is sad, really. We have had over 10 iterations of Ubuntu and the dawn of Linux on the general desktop is nowhere in sight.

Consider for a moment if Ubuntu had started off with KDE as the default desktop! For the single reason that its default layout kind-of looks like Windows, along with Canonical's excellent customisation, we would have had many more converts over to Linux than now where we are blatantly copying Apple, right from the icons in the panel to, now, window buttons on the left!!

With each version, Kubuntu is more or less left to fend on its own. The funny part is that of all the derivatives and alternatives of Ubunutu, the word "kubuntu" happens to be an actual word! Others are all mashes of the word ubuntu.

Consider for a moment if Ubuntu had started off with KDE as the default desktop! For the single reason that its default layout kind-of looks like Windows

Oh common, that's (pardon my straight-forward language) the stupidest reason I've ever heard. KDE 1-3 were heavily inspired by Windows (along with many many inspirations from CDE which is often forgotten), but since 4 the biggest layout similarity with Windows is that by default the task bar is at the bottom of the screen.

If Canonical wanted, they could've easily created a "Windows-like" taskbar in GNOME. There isn't even coding required -- that's part of GNOME's default customization possibilities! SUSE for example does this (along with a new start menu, SLAB, that is coded by SUSE, but can also be installed on any other distro).

Looks don't convert users, apps do. Where is TurboTax for a serious AutoCAD equivalent for Linux? How about a professional video editor like After Effects? The most promising open source video editor is PiTiVi, and even that is quite a ways off.

Linux slowly moves into niches and then dominates them. It certainly has not slowed down so the future holds bright prospects.

Neither does opensuse very much(really only small changes to the plasma theme) and I'm sure happy they don't have anything as awful as Mandriva's Ia Ora. Oxygen kicks ass. Also, Kubuntu has Konqueror as the default browser. How come none of the "better" KDE distros do?
Kubuntu is probably one of the purest KDE distros really.

Too bad that Canonical currently doesn't really "get it" (even though -- in all fairness -- Kubuntu 10.04 seems to be a massive improvement over previous releases).

I still don't get what's supposedly so incredibly bad about the current Kubuntu compared to other distros.

People are working on a QT-port of Firefox, so it will blend in with KDE4

No, sorry, they are not. Yeah, of course people are "working" on it, they have been for so many years, but you'll probably sooner get a usable Hurd than a usable Qt-based Firefox. With QtWebKit it's unlikely there would be anybody bothered enough to finish a Qt-based Firefox and openSUSE's KDE-Firefox integration not actually a Qt-port of Firefox.

People are working on a QT-port of Firefox, so it will blend in with KDE4

There is no Qt port, but SUSE's Lubos Lunak programmed an extension that integrates Firefox with KDE SC (notifications, open/save windows, button order).
Along with a GTK port of the Oxygen theme Firefox integrates almost perfectly into KDE SC.

Neither does opensuse very much(really only small changes to the plasma theme)

That's what I said.

Kubuntu has Konqueror as the default browser. How come none of the "better" KDE distros do?

Because they ship something else, eg. Rekonq (Chakra) or SUSE's KDE port of Firefox.
There was even a discussion about replacing Konqueror with Rekonq on KDE's core development mailing list, but Rekonq's main developer prefers the Extragear module.

I still don't get what's supposedly so incredibly bad about the current Kubuntu compared to other distros.

Quotes from Kubuntu's "Project Timelord" announcement:

"There is a general lack of Quality Assurance on uploads to both development releases and on backports of KDE packages to stable releases. File overwrite errors are too common in both cases. As a potential issue, we also have a collection of patches for most of our core KDE patches. These patches may or may not be of good quality, depending on the patch.
Another issue that seems to pop up is that some KDE modules are not compiled with all the functionality they are capable of. (...) These tend to be forgotten about too easily.

(...)

[Kubuntu-specific] applications lack polish (...) and usually are not integrated well at all with the surrounding system (...), causing needless clutter."

There's a Kubuntu PPA for rekonq and the Firefox integration isn't all that.

[Kubuntu-specific] applications lack polish (...) and usually are not integrated well at all with the surrounding system (...), causing needless clutter."

Funny, that's how I would categorize Yast.It's good that Kubuntu is aiming high though.
That said, I don't notice any lack in quality of the applications compared to SUSE. The KDE environment itself is pretty much the same really with about the same amounts of crashing apps (not many at all, really).

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Ubuntu (and Debian, for that), but the orange/brown default-theme of Ubuntu was not my taste. The new themes look beautilful, have a good balance between dark and light widgets and don't get in your way while working. Thumbs up from me, good work!

While true, placing the buttons on the left is a little retarded. As most of us are right handed it is more natural to have your mouse on the right side of the screen. Hence why faggle puts the icons on the right hand side of the screen. The notifications should be moved. I currently use linux mint 8 with a resolution of 1440x900 the only thing that is ever in the top right corner is pidgin the rest of the screen is used for other windows, they are windows not fullscreendows therefore never interfering with the notifications. They wouldn't be bad lower right tho.

You've missed the point, chances are, when you viewed the page reading left to right, your eyes saw the logo then jumped to the navebar on the right then back down to the content on the page, most users doing this would have moved there mouse cursor to the right side of the page out of the way of the content on the left and started to scroll after noticing that the nav options weren't what the were looking for.

I dont think so. While people are right handed, they tend to look on the left of the screen more. The reason is that we read text from the left to the right. The start menu is also on the left btw.

That's purely habit. Mac OS X sorts desktop icons from right to left.
Mac OS X and even GNOME have a right-to-left button order.
Arab and Hebrew are read from right to left.
Japanese can basically be written in almost any direction as long as it's consistent within one text.

As a right-handed man I think it's more practical to write from left to right, because I don't smear the ink on the paper with my writing hand, but reading in another direction just requires a few minutes of adjusting.

Elegant. That's what comes to mind. I won't comment on the slight feeling of it looking a bit like OSX.
I'm happy for linux distros in general. Ubuntu's win is a win for all... I'll buy that t-shirt but in a different colour :-)

"the new theme places [titlebar widgets] on the left. ... The curious thing, namely, is that the close window titlebar widget is not the left-most one - it is the right-most one!"

The politically-correct/non-committal side of me is also "curious" regarding the justification of this otherwise obtusely apparent design flaw. =)~

The CLOSE button should always be closest to the window corner, since that particular coordinate is the quickest/easiest target for a user to hit... not to mention the most common function a user intends to use of those three. Moving [X] further into the titlebar will undoubtedly slow some of us down (not to mention cause brain farts along the way).

I personally hope this behavior changes by the release date. If it sticks, however, I suppose you can always fix it yourself manually via gconf-editor (apps > metacity > general >>> "button_layout" key; change value to "close,maximize,minimize:menu").

But that's a bit frustrating, as I've always considered UBUNTU to typically have the 'sanest' defaults among the major distros---default theme/wallpaper excepted, of course! (Hey, we can't all like *every* default, right?)

It's exactly the first thing that crossed my mind. The "Close" button is placed in a totally retarded way. I don't think I've touched the Maximize button more than a dozen times since I switched to a widescreen monitor with decent resolution.

The CLOSE button should always be closest to the window corner, since that particular coordinate is the quickest/easiest target for a user to hit...

Probably the exact same reason, only they wanted to keep users from closing windows mistakenly. For example, on my mac I rarely use zoom feature and I minimise by double-clicking the title bar. Window close operation good old cmd-w. If I ever use the buttons, I always happen to hover the leftmost one first and need to carefully steer the cursor.

In Ubuntu, I believe, the window zoom feature is perceived in a different way and people use the maximise button much more often that the close button. To illustrate, when I am in Windows environment, I tend to use the maximise button much more often than the close button.

Imagine the workflow: open window in normal state, maximise, do something, minimise, do something else, maximise, do more stuff, minimise, do more something else, restore, do even more, maximise, finish up, save, exit app. Close button used only once if at all!

This exactly why I think that the close button should be in a separate corner from the min/max buttons. I have occasionally hit the wrong button. It's frustrating. There is probably some usability study that says I'm in some microculture of wrong-button-hitters. At least move the close button away from the other two. Even a little bit would really help the accidental close window problem.

In OS/2 Warp 3 and newer (includes eComStation) the close button is the innermost titlebar widget. The buttons are in the right side, with close,minimize,maximize/restore. Ubuntus solution is simply a reversed OS/2-positioning. I wonder if this will be just as quirky in Ubuntu as in OS/2 & eCS.

EDIT: One should know that it is very easy to change the widget layout. It does require messing with the Gnome "registry".

There is a gui for it. It's just primitive. You have to enter text and/or numbers instead of moving sliders or clicking check boxes. No different than choosing custom colors in windows (which requires entering numbers)

The string is alphanumeric. But yes. This particular setting is letters only (and some special characters). However, the Gnome "registry" also have settings which requires entering numbers. I should have made it clearer that I was speaking of a generic Gnome "registry"-setting in my second post. But all strings are alphanumeric anyway.

But still easy to change the layout anyway. Textual input does not equal "being hard".

It's simple to make a graphical tool for tweaking this, but nobody's bothered. That's because clicking on Configuration Editor, navigating to apps/metacity/general and writing some text in "button_layout" takes about 30 seconds max. Or you can copy and paste this command in a terminal window in 5 seconds:

It's a mixed bag if you ask me. The "branding" and colour choices are great. So is the new bootsplash.
The new gtk is far from "great" IMHO (It's less defined, and more chaotic than the old humanity). I would have kept the old human gtk and applied the new colors to that instead.
The new metacity was quite ugly IMHO. Bleh. I hope they at least do a poll or something, so that people get to voice their opinion about the theme change.

This is obviously something that was thrown together in a few hours without any thought. Here are immediately obvious problems:
The wrong (yes, flat-out wrong) order of the titlebar widgets.
The hodge-podge of colors thrown together - the white window color, but slightly off-white titlebar and menu; the quite purple-tinted tooltip and wallpaper, but much bluer highlights and shadows on the buttons and highlighted items.
The tango icons that don't match with anything but the strange off-white titlebar.
The horrible simple non-nuanced gradient in the trough behind the titlebar widgets.
The "x" icon (the one on the active window) stolen from a completely different icon set than anything else on the screen.

This theme makes it look like the designer was supposed to be working on it a while, but was actually sleeping on the job, and when it suddenly came time to turn something in, he stayed up the night before throwning something together.

The only thing I don't like is that there's some Apple-ish look in. I hate Apple and I would not like my PC to copy the OSX look. Then again, I already worked hard to take some of that OSX feel out of Windows 7, so I hope there's still some customization room in Ubuntu to get rid of the OSX touches.

Those monochrome icons in the upper panel are just idiotic. They look great until you actually launch something that uses a colored notification icon(skype, transmission, amule, ekiga, pidgin, etc) or you place some launchers in the panel just like everyone has been doing for the last years. Then consistency is gone. Can they provide a monochrome alternative for every icons? Bah

This is not an overhaul at all. It is just a different color scheme with different icons and different border. GNOME still looks like GNOME/GTK. An overhaul means something completely different. An example for this could be that little script that makes GNOME look like XP nearly pixel by pixel similarity.

There is also a way to decrease the size of the gigantic widgets and make them smaller to take less space. If you apply the Redmond theme for instance, all of the buttons take less space and it looks much neater. Sure it's ugly but you get the point.

Maybe it's beautiful, but it's not very usable*. Many widgets can't be clearly differentiated from each other. Some people might be willing to get used to it (because they like the looks), but it's nothing for the masses. It reminds me of the many WinAmp skins, they place nice pictures behind the GUI, but the GUI itself becomes hardly existent.

"Hardly existant" is the whole point. For me, there is too much visual clutter with most themes. The flatter, less gradient-y themes remove that clutter and make the content that I'm actually working on stand out and the operating system dissappear.

I agree, a GUI should really be "hardly existant" so that you don't notice it really; I also hate gradients and glowy/glossy stuff. But in the above example, many widgets didn't even have a border, which is the wrong kind of "hardly existant" for me

The second example is really better. Personally, I think the Windows 95 GUI was the cleanest GUI that I ever used. Under Gnome, I use a customized version of "Raleigh" (only the colors are customized a bit) for the widgets and a CDE-lookalike for the window borders.

The theme itself is ok i guess, but window button controls are placed so awkwardly, that it will be difficult to get used tu, unless there is a way to put them in the usual place and in the usual order.

Love everything, boot up screen is slick looking, theme is awesome (good thing there is light and dark versions), wallpaper is nice, and we already know the icons theme is superb from 9.10. But I don't like the placement of the window buttons, hope I can have them back on the right hand side of th window.

I tried a little experiment. Put your mouse in the center of the screen and open a new maximised window. Now quickly flick your mouse and close the window.

With the X on the top right, it's easy. I overshoot by miles and the cursor hangs out right where it's supposed to be. When I try the same thing in the opposite corner, I end up about an inch short and have to move my whole hand. I am a righty. Also, I can move easily to every corner except top left w/o moving my hand. Which is probably why windows put the start menu on the bottom left (it's something you want to click quickly w/o thinking about it.) Anytime you access the "File" menu you're should be working slow/carefully anyways..... hopefully away from the "close" button.

A window title was the little yellow bar just above the main window area, and the control "widgets" (to use Thom's terminology, never ever called them widgets that I can recall... but I digress...) were immediately to the right of the title. So, in most cases the title bar wasn't nearly as long/large as the main window the "widgets" got scrunched up to the left more although displaced from being comletely on the left by the title text.

I think that there were a few other GUIs that placed them specifically on the left as well, but I can't recall what those GUIs were as I, evidently, never used them for very long or only saw screenshots or mockups of them long ago.

In any event, I'd imagine that the "widget" placement will be easily modifiable by themes and I'd imagine that it would annoy enough people that if the end product ends up as on the wiki some user will create a theme package to "fix" it for those who are tied to their "widget"'s positioning. (Personally I prefer to use keyboard shortcuts to avoid mouse tracking... so I doubt that I'll really care excepting for the case of unresponsive apps in linux that also seem to occasionally clog up the entire system which makes clicking the close "widget" a quick possibility of killing the offending blocking app especially if the system is so slow that desktop changes/etc. are very slow. i.e. getting to a terminal, then finding and killing the process... AAMOF I've often resorted to simply powercycling on occasion.

Judging by the screenshots, the new Ubuntu theme looks quite dark and heavy. I wonder why they wanted to name it "Light"?

Well, that doesn't really bother me. I'm probably not going to use Ubuntu much on my computers. I usually test-install every new Ubuntu release on a spare partition, but so far none of these installations have stayed for more than a couple of days. I think I like this new theme a bit better than the old theme, but I generally prefer a somewhat lighter gtk+2 theme (the default xfce4 theme with slight modifications of my own, especially to make the scrollbar dark grey, so you can actually see it).

And what's this talk about "titlebars" and "widgets"? I've configured fvwm not to show any titlebars, so the programs can use more of the available screen space. Hey, you only need to learn three keyboard shortcuts and then you can maximize, minimize, and close windows without touching the mouse. And the other two window managers that I occasionally use -- ratpoison and stumpwm -- don't even support titlebars.

Also, I prefer to use "xsetroot -solid gray10" as my desktop background image. I reckon the less the themes and desktop wallpapers attract your attention, the more time you're going to spend doing what you actually want to do with your computer.

I like the new font for 'Ubuntu', but what I don't like is that they've all but hidden their recognized 'three-dotted circle' logo inside this little afterthought of an apostrophe after their name.

I say, take the 'three-dotted circle' out of that white dot, let it stand out on it's own. It's the most recognized part of their visual identity (not to mention the topic icon for Ubuntu stories on OSnews).

First of all, people tend to pay all too much attention to such surficial things like colouring of theming. Those things can be easily changed by anyone reading a forum like this.

As to the new looks, I get the feeling that it looks rather mediocre still, unfinished and even confusing in many ways. The colouring might still need some improvement too in order to look more coherent. Now it still looks like a mix of old and new. Also the contrasts between the darker and lighter elements in the darker version of the default theme may look too strong, IMHO. But, anyway, like I said above, colouring is a minor thing and easily changed.

Much more problematic is the new window manager button ordering in the screenshots - like already pointed by many other commentators above. Actually I find it hard to believe that the final Ubuntu 10.04 could really use something so non-standard and odd as the default Metacity button ordering?

Placing the window manager buttons in the upper left corner of the window, like Mac OS X does, works from the point of view of minimizing the amount of mouse movements (menus, buttons, screen top panel). But if you want to go the Mac way, do it fully then and at least place the close button in the corner. In every window manager that I know, the closing button is placed in the window corner. Probably most people will find the setting shown in the screenshots quite odd indeed.

Also, it would probably save many Ubuntu users from frustration to keep the old Human themes around as legacy options too. Despite all the complaints, many people, me included, have found the Human themes quite nice too. Compared to the Ubuntu 09.10 default Human looks the new proposed 10.04 theming shown in the screenshots looks quite unfinished still.